Friday, January 16, 2009

But the clock is ticking!

So obviously you must torture, right? Right?

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) could not fathom that an Attorney General would reject a practice that both is unlawful and endangers Americans. He tried to get Holder to back off his anti-torture stance by presenting an absurd “ticking time bomb” hypothetical in which thousands of American lives are at stake. “You would still refuse to condone aggressive interrogation techniques?” Cornyn asked. When Holder replied that waterboarding is not the only interrogation method, Cornyn insisted, “Assume that it was”:

HOLDER: I think your hypothetical assumes a premise that I’m not willing to concede.

CORNYN: I know you don’t like my hypothetical.

HOLDER: No, the hypothetical’s fine; the premise that underlies it I’m not willing to accept, and that is that waterboarding is the only way that I could get that information from those people.

CORNYN: Assume that it was.

HOLDER: [Laughs] Given the knowledge that I have about other techniques and what I’ve heard from retired admirals and generals and FBI agents, there are other ways in a timely fashion that you can get information out of people that is accurate and will produce useable intelligence. And so it’s hard for me to accept or to answer your hypothetical without accepting your premise. And in fact, I don’t think I can do that.

Longer Cornyn:

If we stop torturing that means that torture doesn't work and even though we've been told by the FBI and the CIA and lots of interrogators torture doesn't work and ruins the morale of the military, the citizenry, and the world attitude towards the US, we must keep torturing because the tv series 24 shows us we need to and besides if we stop torturing that means that the PNAC neocons and Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeld were wrong and we can't have that!!!